Sunday, May 15, 2005

oceanic "dead zones" on the rise

Report at The Independent Online by Andrew Buncombe and Geoffrey Lean reveals that the world's oceans are exhibiting a rapidly increasing number of dead zones, "where pollution has starved the sea of life-giving oxygen and thus killing fish and underwater vegetation".

This is just one sign of a rapidly growing crisis. The number of similar dead zones in the world's seas has doubled every decade since 1960, as a result of increasing pollution. The United Nations Environment Programme says that there are now 146 of them worldwide, mainly around the coasts of rich countries. Its executive director, Klaus Töpfer, calls their growth "a gigantic, global experiment ... triggering alarming, and sometimes irreversible, effects".